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Exile – defined as an estrangement from one's home and one's homeland, one's history, family, and friends – is a recurring theme in Irish poetic modernism. This chapter focuses on the poetry of Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and George Reavey. Their poetry is still too widely considered marginal to the canon of Irish poetry, in part because Ireland, almost a century after gaining independence, continues to struggle with categories of Irishness. The chapter argues that the work of Beckett, Coffey, Devlin, MacGreevy, and Reavey represents an important and too...

Exile – defined as an estrangement from one's home and one's homeland, one's history, family, and friends – is a recurring theme in Irish poetic modernism. This chapter focuses on the poetry of Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and George Reavey. Their poetry is still too widely considered marginal to the canon of Irish poetry, in part because Ireland, almost a century after gaining independence, continues to struggle with categories of Irishness. The chapter argues that the work of Beckett, Coffey, Devlin, MacGreevy, and Reavey represents an important and too often ignored extended Irish community. Their aesthetic and political formation takes place during the years of l'entre deux guerres.